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More Than 90 Percent of Employers Will Use Social Recruiting

Using social media platforms to recruit new employees is now more the norm than the exception, according to a recent survey of more than 1,000 US human resource and recruitment professionals.

Jobvite has conducted a “social recruiting” study annually since 2008, but this year, the results showed that a whopping 92 percent of companies now turn to social networks to seek out and attract talent –that’s up from less than 80 percent back in 2008.

What’s more, while LinkedIn has always been (and continues to be) the preferred social platform used by recruiters, both Facebook and Twitter have gained momentum as tools for ferreting out the best prospects—and for weeding out those who might not fit into a certain corporate culture, as well.

Is there any particular criteria that may pique an employer’s interest?

As you might expect, most (eight out of 10) respondents reported they were favorably impressed by people who mention in their social media profiles that they belong to professional organizations, and two-thirds approved of those who include volunteer work and charitable donations in their bios. In addition, more than half of those surveyed said they were neutral to posts and profiles demonstrating a person’s political or religious beliefs.

On the flip side, a vast majority of recruiters and HR professionals are turned off by social media comments referring to illegal drug use and to those of a sexual nature. More than 60 percent also reacted negatively to profanity in posts, and more than half took a dim view of posts and profiles with spelling and grammar errors.

Among the other findings in this survey:

More than 70 percent of those polled said they had successfully hired a candidate located through social media, up from 63 percent the year before.

Nearly half stated that social media provided them with a greater selection of candidates to chooses from.

93 percent of those who do social recruiting have hired employees found on LinkedIn, versus 25 percent through Facebook and 15 percent via Twitter.

Facebook social recruiting saw the greatest jump, with two-thirds of the respondents stating they use the site as part of their social recruitment strategy, compared to the 55 percent who admitted to using it in 2011.

Social recruiting is proving to be convenient, low cost and effective (an earlier study even showed that Facebook trumps personality tests in predicting how well a potential candidate will perform on the job), and I can only imagine it will continue to gain momentum among hiring professionals going forward. (Please remember that when you tweet, post and comment!)

“The rise in social recruiting has allowed both candidates and employers an easier way to find the best match,” concluded Dan Finnigan, president and CEO of Jobvite. “We continue to see social recruiting gain popularity because it is more efficient than the days of sifting through a haystack of resumes.”

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For those job seekers who shy away from having any social media presence or interaction with employers / recruiters, it can be used as a notification tool as well. There are over 10,000 Twitter job channels tweeting out job openings every single day via TweetMyJobs: http://www.tweetmyjobs.com/